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It’s perhaps not the best conversation to start while you’re lying on someone else’s bed and they’re propped against the wall beside you, but Carl’s back hurts from sitting on the floor, and it’s early enough in the morning and he’s loopy enough not to care about what’s normal when it comes to addressing your colleagues anymore.
“You know I’ve never had someone do that to me. Deep throat.”
Above him, legs flung over Carl’s shins and nose buried in a sheaf of notes, Bob hums a vague acknowledgement but says nothing, which Carl takes to mean he doesn’t care about social norms either.
“Have you?” he continues, because now that he’s brought it up he might as well.
Bob tilts his head back against the wall, brow furrowed in thought. The single lamp still on in the room leaves his expression difficult to decipher and makes the conversation feel more clandestine, cloaked in nighttime quiet even though Carl knows dawn is beginning to peek through the curtains in the other room. Carl should have gone home long ago.
“Not really,” Bob settles on.
“How do you mean ‘not really’?”
Bob gives a tired, helpless shrug, legs a heavy presence atop Carl’s as he flexes them to stretch out his calves. “I’ve had girls try, but they always look like they’re not having any fun, and when they keep gagging and apologizing it sort of kills the mood.” He shrugs again, this time with a half-grimaced what can you do. “So I don’t usually ask, but to be honest I don’t see what the problem is. It’s not that hard.”
He winces, immediately realizing how the dismissal sounds and clearly debating whether clarifying would make it worse. Carl takes pity on him.
“How can you know?” he says, injecting a note of derision into his voice to reassure Bob that there is no suggestion he thinks Bob would . No matter that they’ve both left plausible deniability behind in anyone else’s eyes; Bob and Carl both know that Bob’s knees hooked over Carl’s calves means nothing more than it seems on the surface. There is still room for denials between the two of them, if need be.
“I don’t know, but it’s got to be easier than that,” Bob says, sounding more defensive of his position than his heterosexuality. “You’d just have to breathe carefully.”
Carl almost can’t believe what he says next, but apparently he’s finally gone completely off the deep end, because he demands, “stick your fingers down your throat.”
And Bob has gone crazy too, because he does it. Two fingers, all the way down to the third knuckle, and as he does it he levels Carl with an unimpressed stare. It shouldn’t be compelling.
Bob pulls his fingers out and wipes them on Carl’s thigh. “So?”
Carl stares. It can’t be that Bob has gone twenty-nine years of his life and doesn’t know. “You have no gag reflex and you think everyone else lives like you do,” he says disbelievingly. Bob just blinks at him.
Carl almost has to laugh. Bob has been judging these poor girls for a perfectly natural physical reaction just because he was born with the necessary prerequisites to swallow swords? “See,” he says, “if I tried to do what you just did I’d throw up. I can barely get my fingers an inch into my mouth before I gag.”
“Oh,” Bob says.
“It’s a shame, really; it’s wasted on you. You’d give great blowjobs.”
Bob stares blankly at him for several seconds and Carl is preparing to walk it back, apologize for the absolutely off-the-wall insinuation and end the conversation there when Bob finally twists to face him, eyes shining with the light of a very bad idea. Carl changes his mind.
“Can I suck your dick?”
It’s both unexpected and expected, and Carl both knows what to say and doesn’t. So he says nothing.
“You suggested it,” Bob says, which Carl can’t honestly deny. He didn’t mean the suggestion, but he made it.
Are you gay, he wants to ask. Are you crazy is probably the more important question.
“Let’s go somewhere brighter,” he says.
It should be the other way around; it’s harder to see each other here in the dim yellow lamplight, more impersonal. But it’s also cozier, intimate, and Bob’s sheets smell like Bob in a way that makes it all too real. Better to do it in the sober light of day - clinical, almost, an experiment between two friends, a pact entered into eyes open. It doesn’t even occur to him to decline.
Bob acquiesces with a nod, and they relocate to the living room in expectant silence. Carl’s stomach twists, not quite with arousal but with something uncertain and nervous, making his cheeks hot and his limbs numb, a sensation akin to panic.
It will probably be bad. Bob has obviously never done this before, and while Carl can admit to himself that he thinks about Bob in ways one might call gay if he ever said them out loud, he would bet all the cash in his wallet that Bob has never considered him in that light until just now. Bob will hate it, and they’ll stop, and that will be it.
The thought is surprisingly disappointing.
“You sit there, I guess,” Bob says, indicating a spare dining chair against the wall, upholstered in billiards-table-green velvet. “And I… kneel?”
“Give me a minute,” Carl says, fighting down embarrassment. He’s not even hard, though the heat in his cheeks has morphed into something else and the knots in his stomach are beginning to sink lower and loosen into something much closer to anticipation. Still, he’s not a teenager anymore and he can’t get hard at just the thought of Bob on his knees, mouth stretched around Carl’s cock and eyes wide with the realization that he likes being there. Or at least he’d like to think he can’t.
He hesitates for a moment before unzipping his pants and, after another moment’s hesitation, takes them off. It probably would have made the situation less awkward to leave them mostly on, but if things go the way they seem to be heading, Bob’s face is going to spend a while very close to Carl’s lap and it feels rude to leave a zipper in the way. He kicks off pants and underwear but leaves on his socks, steels himself, and sits down. Hesitantly, Bob knees before him, palms flat and demure on his thighs.
This is going terribly. But Bob looks so pleadingly expectant, and he asked, and Carl has been dreaming of this sight and he can’t say no now that it’s right in front of him.
But he’s still not hard.
“Could you… look away for a minute? Or no,” Carl dares to correct, determination firming in the face of Bob’s eye-roll, “close your eyes. Open your mouth.”
Bob does, though he cocks a skeptical, unimpressed eyebrow. And yet, even with the eyebrow, it works. It’s not so awkward anymore, and with his eyes closed Bob seems to settle into expectation rather than nerves, mouth hanging half-open, hands fisting and unfisting in the fabric of his pants.
Carl wraps a hand around his cock, and the immediate spark of pleasure shocks him. He has thought of this, but nothing in his imagination could have prepared him for the slight furrow between Bob’s brows, his shallow breaths as he listens for the rustle of Carl’s wrist against his shirt.
“Are you -”
“Yeah,” Carl breathes, firming his grip. Bob fills his vision, looking for all the world like he’s getting something he never thought he’d be offered - like he’s been dreaming of it too.
Carl lets the idea of it spur his hand to move faster, to let Bob hear the quiet pants falling from his lips, proof that Carl wants this, that he wants to give Bob what he asked for. He could come just like this, given time, all over Bob’s face, and Bob would take it and, Carl thinks, probably like it. But that’s not what he asked.
“Open,” Carl says hoarsely, unsure whether he means eyes or mouth. Bob opens both, eyes widening further at the image Carl must present: shirt-tails brushing the tip of his cock, hair a mess even though he hasn’t touched it, sticking to his forehead and catching in his eyelashes even as he tries to take it all in. Bob looks so innocent, so curious, and Carl is about to satisfy that curiosity.
But Bob shakes his head, huffing a wry laugh, and Carl’s heart nearly stops. “Shit, Carl,” he says, mouth twitching. “You’re sure not making it easy on a guy for his first time.”
Carl can feel himself flushing red, both with embarrassment and a small amount of pride. “You don’t have to actually deep throat it -”
“No, I plan to,” Bob reassures him. He shuffles forward on his knees and places his palms firmly atop Carl’s thighs, a surprisingly warm and grounding pressure that keeps Carl in place when he thinks he might otherwise have jumped out of his skin at the static shock. Bob grins. “Sorry, carpet.”
“No problem. Cuts the tension,” Carl manages, throat dry. He swallows. The pause hasn’t killed his erection at all - if anything, he’s harder than before, as if Bob’s mere proximity has a direct effect on his cock. If Bob leaned any closer Carl would probably be able to feel his breaths when he spoke.
Carl strokes a hand through Bob’s hair and tangles his fingers into the longer strands at the nape of his neck, tugging him ever so slightly closer. Bob laughs softly, and just as Carl suspected, the huff of cool air makes his cock twitch and jump in his hand, a bead of precome forming at the tip. Bob laughs again and then, like someone much more experienced in this arena than he professes himself to be, leans even further forward to blow a steady, targeted stream of air directly at the head of Carl’s cock.
“Jesus,” Carl hisses, hand tightening in Bob’s hair. “Aren’t you supposed to be shy and nervous or something?”
Bob shrugs. “You already told me I’m going to be great; what do I have to be shy about? Head first, or however the saying goes.” He smiles at his own joke, and, with those punning words, pushes Carl’s thighs further apart, leans down, and takes the head of Carl’s cock into his mouth.
Carl, taken off guard, suppresses the instinctive jump of his hips and forces himself still. He can’t choke Bob the instant Bob gets his mouth on him. Although, he thinks deliriously, he can’t choke Bob at all. But it’s still good manners not to fuck someone’s mouth without permission.
The noise Bob makes is almost enough to break Carl’s resolve not to do just that - surprised, intrigued, maybe a little relieved, but more than all those intoxicated. Bob hums like he’s just discovered his new favorite flavor, and his hands on Carl’s thighs grip tight, sending sparks of dull pain down to Carl’s toes that somehow hurt less than they turn him on further.
Before Carl can catch his breath and without preamble - as seems to be his modus operandi - Bob pulls off just long enough to lick his lips, and then he pulls them over his teeth, takes a deep breath in through his nose, and takes Carl in deep. Carl’s breath catches and an embarrassing whine suffocates in his throat as the tight, wet heat of Bob’s mouth engulfs him. Christ, he’s as deep in Bob as he’s ever been in any girl, and this is only the beginning.
Bob sets a slow pace at first as he accustoms himself to the situation, but if Carl didn’t know for absolute certain that Bob is a novice at cocksucking, he would call it a calculated tease. Bob’s exploratory pace is most people’s cruising speed, and it is also perfectly tuned to drive Carl out of his mind. Bob’s mouth drags tortuously over Carl’s cock just a fraction slower than Carl prefers, cheeks hollowing and tongue rubbing clumsily along the underside each time he pulls off, only to sink down again with the precision of a metronome. His eyes have slipped shut, crinkling at the corners, and Carl would rather die than arrest his momentum just to give him constructive criticism.
And then Bob does it: what he promised, what he asked for, what Carl never in his wildest dreams could have imagined. He takes another deep breath, and for a moment something like indecision passes over his face before his expression firms, and then there’s no stopping him. He sinks down, excruciatingly slow, until his nose brushes Carl’s pubic hair and Carl’s cock brushes the back of his spasming throat, and stays there. His throat pushes back against the intrusion, spasming around the head, but Bob doesn’t gag, doesn’t pull away. He just sighs and settles in.
“Shit,” Carl says. “Shit, shit, Bob, Christ, I can’t believe you’re - I was right, I fucking called it, you’re so good at this, fuck.”
Bob whines around his cock, eyes screwed shut. The vibration sends shivers up Carl’s spine even as Bob seems to choke on it, swallowing convulsively until he pulls back just long enough to breathe before sliding his mouth right back down.
Carl curses, unable to stop himself from wrapping a hand around the hair at the crown of Bob’s head and holding him there, pressing Bob’s face harder against his crotch as his hips twitch up in little jerks, fucking himself impossibly deeper into Bob’s mouth. It’s hot and wet and getting wetter as Bob’s saliva pools around the base and drips down Carl’s thighs to soak into the ugly green upholstery. Bob’s throat is tighter than Carl ever dreamed it would be, and with Bob’s eyes closed in bliss even as tears gather at the corners, Carl hates himself a little bit for ruining the moment. But god help him, he has no other choice.
He grips Bob’s hair tighter, pulling him off far enough to look him in the eye, and holds him there when Bob whines more urgently and shoots Carl a pathetic glare. “I know, shh,” Carl says nonsensically, brushing Bob’s sweaty hair back out of his eyes with his free hand. “Just need to see your eyes when I ask you.” That will be the true test; just a nod won’t do. Carl needs to see that Bob wants this. “Can I fuck your face?”
The answer is everything Carl hoped it would be. Bob’s eyes go wide and his mouth falls open on a moan that speaks clear as day: yes, yes, yes. He strains against Carl’s hold in his hair, all suction gone as he pants and whines when Carl refuses to let go.
“Hold still. I don’t want to choke you,” Carl says, and only when Bob huffs a reluctant agreement and settles back on his heels does Carl tentatively guide him forward again, stopping about halfway down Carl’s length. Aside from his fingers digging painfully into Carl’s thighs, Bob exerts no force whatsoever. He just lets Carl situate him and waits, staring up through watery eyes with calm expectation and an astonishing degree of trust. Carl hopes he’s worthy of it.
He thrusts in once, carefully, and Bob moans again, guttural and wrecked. He relaxes his throat without any instructions from Carl, wraps his lips around Carl’s cock as tight as he can and lets Carl fuck his face, tongue held stiffly against the underside of Carl’s cock as it slides between his lips. He looks like he’s never enjoyed anything more in his life; if his mouth weren’t otherwise occupied Carl knows he would be smiling.
That settles it. Carl lets his thrusts grow sloppier, harder, listening to the click of Bob’s throat as he tries in vain to swallow. Tears well in Bob’s eyes and stream down his cheeks, splattering onto Carl’s thighs like a hot, salty orgasm in their own right. He moans nearly continuously, head held still by Carl’s cruelly tight grip in his hair, and his whole body shivers, wracked by a constant, buzzing tremor. Carl can barely hear his own harsh breaths, barely feel any sensation besides the heat and grip of Bob’s mouth surrounding him. He’s close.
Carl’s hips stutter, shoving as deep into Bob as he can possibly go, and Bob seems to lose all control. His fingers scrabble at Carl’s thighs and his eyelids flutter wildly and he sobs, high and urgent, and Carl has no time to warn him before sensation explodes back into the rest of his body, zinging along his nerve pathways even as it coalesces, a searing warmth low in his stomach, and for a second everywhere Bob is touching him feels like touching liquid nitrogen. And then Carl is coming, gasping something like Bob’s name, crushing Bob to him as he comes and comes and Bob cries and moans and swallows and swallows until Carl can’t handle the sensation anymore and gently lifts him off.
It takes several seconds for Bob’s eyes to flicker open again, glassy and unfocused, and in that time Carl realizes just how wet his cheeks are with tears. It hits him like a bucket of cold water: god, what did he do? That was so much more than a blowjob between friends; Carl took liberties with Bob he never should have taken without asking. Bob deserved so much better from his first blowjob - from any blowjob, really, but it’s worse that this was his introduction to it.
“God, Bob, I’m sorry, I got carried away,” Carl says breathlessly, searching Bob’s face for any sign of anger or pain. “I’m so sorry, did I hurt you?”
Bob shakes his head, still looking dazed, and croaks out something unintelligible. He clears his throat with a wince. “No, you didn’t hurt me. It was… god, my throat feels like sandpaper. But it was worth it. Thanks for… for letting me try, I guess.”
“Thank you,” Carl says. He can feel the awkwardness settling in and scrambles to reel them back in, bring them back to normal. “Come on, show me where your tea kettle is. I know a great sore throat recipe.”
Bob laughs, though it turns into a hacking cough, and starts to rise to his feet. Then he winces and, with a look of panic, sits back down.
“Shit, sorry, I bet you can’t feel your feet. Lemme help you up,” Carl says, realizing yet again how thoughtless he’s been. He holds his hand out to Bob, but Bob refuses to take it.
“It’s on top of the cabinet above the fridge. You go, I’ll sit here for a minute.” He won’t look at Carl.
Shit. Carl was right; he did overstep his bounds, and now it’s weird.
Tea can wait. Fixing this is paramount. Carl drops to one knee beside Bob, bringing a tentative hand to his knee. “Nuh-uh. If there’s something wrong you gotta tell me. I’m not going to let things get weird because of this.”
Bob jerks like he’s been stung, shying away from the touch, and in the process of snatching his hand away Carl accidentally brushes against it: a damp patch on the front of Bob’s pants, fabric stretched over Bob’s erection.
Bob hangs his head in shame. “You can really leave now,” he says irritably.
Carl gapes. “Why on earth would I do that?”
“Cause if you don’t I’ll - I just need a second to calm down.”
“Calm down? Why? Sorry, I’dve offered a hand except I thought - scoot over, let me - unless you don’t want my help,” Carl says, cold realization washing over him. Bob wanted to suck someone’s dick. That it ended up being Carl’s dick was just right place, right time. Of course he doesn’t want Carl’s hand on his cock.
Bob just shakes his head and laughs that raspy laugh again. “You don’t have to take pity on me, Carl, just go make tea. This is embarrassing enough already.”
“Embarrassing because…” Carl says, blinking.
“Because I liked it. Because I’m the kind of guy who gets hard from sucking dick. Because I want you to touch me, so please get out of my living room before I actually ask you to do it.”
Bob liked it. Bob does want Carl’s hand on his cock. Carl doesn’t need to ask any follow-up questions. He manhandles Bob to face him, sparing a brief apologetic thought for jostling Bob’s fast-asleep feet, and fumbles at the zipper of Bob’s pants. “Absolutely not,” he says, silencing Bob’s protest with a stream of elated babble. “I knew you liked it, Bob, god, can you even imagine what you looked like? Crying all over me, just sitting there letting me fuck your face like you were born to take it. I only didn’t offer to reciprocate because honest to god I thought you already came.”
He manages to open Bob’s pants and pull out his cock, flushed angry red and standing straight upright. Carl knows he’d choke on anything more than just the head, but in that moment he thinks it might be worth it. But Bob deserves the best Carl has to offer after the performance he just gave, and Carl isn’t about to make a fool of himself by throwing up in Bob’s lap. Instead he grips Bob’s cock confidently, if a little awkwardly, and watches Bob’s next protest die in his throat as his mouth falls open on another one of those addicting whimpers. This time, his eyes stay fixed on Carl, pink with tears and wide with incomprehension.
“Carl, what - you don’t have to, you’re not - just because I’m -”
That’s a ridiculous thought, but Carl is too enthralled with the weight of Bob’s cock in his hand to tease him about it. He must have been hard for ages; the wet patch on his pants was only a hint of the precome leaking from the tip of his cock, smoothing Carl’s way without any spit or lube necessary. He strokes slowly, like Bob sucked him, keeping an even pace and a firm pressure. It stands to reason Bob sucks cock like he likes to be touched, and Carl hasn’t got any other experience to go off of.
“Of course I am,” he says, and gives in to the urge to lean closer and speak the words into the space between their lips - not a kiss, just shared air, Bob’s quiet pants falling between them like a mirrored confession. “Why’d you think I said yes when you asked?”
“Because - because every guy’d say yes to getting his cock sucked,” Bob manages, eyes dropping helplessly to Carl’s lips. “Doesn’t say anything about you. Not like it says about me.”
Carl is pretty sure it says a lot about him, but he has a much more effective argument in his arsenal than simple logic. He speeds up the strokes of his hand, pressing his thumb against the ridge below the head of Bob’s cock with the same pressure he remembers from Bob’s tongue, and cups Bob’s cheek with his other hand. “Then listen to what I say about me. And I say I liked it, and I like this, and I really, really want to taste my come on your lips.”
“You - you can’t taste it,” Bob says shakily, head falling back and thighs trembling. “You came too far down my throat, I can’t even taste it. But you could - ah -”
Bob cuts off just as Carl realizes the permission he has just been given, mouth fallen open as his cock jerks in Carl’s hand and come soaks into Bob’s shirt. For all his whining earlier, Bob comes nearly silently, but Carl drinks in his hitching breaths just as greedily as he drank in Bob’s moans around his cock. And, since Bob gave him permission, he gives in to the urge to kiss him anyway, tasting the last remnants of himself but mostly Bob, lips chapped from being stretched so wide for so long, tongue weary and clumsy against Carl’s own, giving in to the kiss while he shudders through his orgasm.
Carl keeps kissing Bob until Bob bats Carl’s hand away from his oversensitive cock, and even then he simply shifts targets to Bob’s neck. He waits until Bob’s breathing has steadied and then bites lightly at his earlobe.
Bob shivers, shifts, and makes an urgent sound. “Carl, stop, fuck, my legs - fuck, ow.”
Carl, whose heart briefly ceased beating at the sound of Bob’s stop, collapses into laughter, burying his face in Bob’s neck and running a soothing hand down his back. “Poor baby, are your feet asleep?”
“It’s not funny,” Bob says, but his thoroughly-fucked throat betrays him and his voice cracks on funny. Carl laughs harder. “Fuck you.”
“If you want to, sure,” Carl says easily. “I gotta be able to take you in deep at least one way.”
Bob doesn’t answer right away; he’s in the process of painfully stretching out his legs, cringing into Carl’s hand on his back as the pins and needles hit him full-force. Finally, through gritted teeth, he manages, “it’s not a contest.”
“Shit, I hope not. I’d lose for sure, and I hate losing to you.”
“But,” Bob says, “if you’re asking me to fuck you…”
“We’ll see,” Carl says, settling in beside Bob to massage the feeling back into his calves. Bob hums gratefully and doesn’t complain when Carl presses a kiss to his shoulder. “I don’t think I’ll be done with your mouth for a while yet. You nearly killed me this time; just think how good you’ll be with practice.” He remembers a thought from earlier and can’t help a smile, hiding his laughter in Bob’s sleeve. “Those poor girls. They tried their best, and all along you’ve been god’s gift to cocksucking.”
Bob huffs a soft laugh and kisses Carl’s forehead in return. “Yeah. I guess I’m pretty good at it. You mentioned a sore throat cure?”
There’s no need for denials between them anymore; there’s nothing left to deny. But even so, Carl thinks, this - Carl’s hands working the stiffness out of Bob’s calves, Bob’s companionable weight against his side - doesn’t have to mean anything more than it does on the surface. They can be them, just like this, and to hell with what’s normal.